Allroad Elite Disc Wheel

Gravel and all-road cyclists know that the best rides occur on the roads that are less traveled, where under maintained surfaces offer up a variety of adventures and beautiful scenery, be it on a training ride, a season-capping race, or that weeklong bikepacking trip you've been dying to check off the list. Obviously, subjecting a drop bar bike to these conditions places a huge demand on your equipment and cyclists are always balancing weight, durability, and cost. Thankfully, more and more gravel and all-road equipment exist today and fill in the void where road bikes aren't able to tackle rougher, gravel paths and you're mountain bike's suspension is simply overkill and heavy. Gravel bikes built with disc brakes offer up additional clearance for bigger rubber and wider rims, promising better traction and comfort and if you're looking to take advantage of this, have a look at the Allroad Elite Disc Wheel from Mavic. These wheels are tubeless ready and pack value and durability with its lightweight Maxtal rims gliding you over smoother, graded gravel paths as well as washboard riddled farm roads with the choice of 30, 35, or 40mm tires to suit your preferred riding conditions.

Mavic may have been late to take on tubeless in narrower rim applications, but we're pretty sure it was a matter of being patient for perfection. Instead of tossing a tubeless rim on the market to battle with the masses, designers at Mavic took their sweet time, ensuring that you can achieve not just lower tire pressures and increased flat protection, but do so without the grueling effort of installing and seating a tubeless tire on your rim. This was done by designing the tire and rim together as a unit, which results in a tire that fits flawlessly, with tool-free installation, and a snug fit that you can count on holding up when you're sending it down a steep dirt road with a sharp left hook at the bottom.

The Allroad Elite wheels grace you with many of the design features of the pricier Allroad Pro but shave the price down for self-sponsoring riders by carrying on with a bit more material, resulting in a weight that hits the scales in only 90-grams heavier than its pricier counterpart. The rims are crafted from Maxtal — a proprietary aluminum alloy specific to Mavic, designed to offer a better strength to weight ratio than standard 6106 alloy. The rim utilizes Mavic's SUP technology — short for Sounde Usine Process, which creates a milled seam for a smoother, stronger finish, as well as ISM 4D inter-spoke milling, which reduces weight and inertia without compromising durability. This translates to quicker accelerating, improved handling, and better durability on every ride you tackle.

The rims are laced up to Mavic's Instant Drive 360 hubs with 24 straight-pull spokes for improved stiffness and ride quality. The hubs represent a drastic departure from tradition, as the engagement mechanism replaces the usual pawl system with the dual-ratcheting rings formally found only in designer hubs on custom hand-builts. The design involves two rings that press together laterally. One face of the rings' teeth is sloped, so they ramp off of each other while freewheeling. The other face isn't, so the rings engage with pedal input. The design cuts the engagement angle down to nine degrees, a number we might expect to see on a mountain bike hub but are pleasantly surprised to find on the road or gravel.